Episode 7 – Looking to the future
Entry posted by DutyDruid
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Anyone who has had to work with me closely in any capacity will know that I tend towards having bright ideas, tossing the hand grenade into the conversation and then sitting back and watching things develop. Indeed, at one point when I was working for the US Navy I went into the office one morning and said to my team “I had a really neat idea on the train on the way in” – and they all scarpered, every single one of them. Oh well!
INCOMMING!
Now, I must prefix this post by stating very publicly and VERY LOUDLY that I am playing Devil’s Advocate here. In some ways we are getting a little stagnant in what we do. We have just made a significant leap forward in securing the future of the Club in the form of gaining our CIO status so perhaps now might be a good time to review where we are and what we are doing. I am going to float ideas in this post, they are not necessarily views I hold, they are only intended to provoke thought and discussion when we escape this confinement.
So, the starting point for this post has to be to review the layouts we have in the Club and I’m going to concentrate on the 00 gauge ones – to attempt what I am thinking about in 0 Gauge would require, well, a warehouse; equally, I don’t believe we have enough N Gauge modellers to make it work in that scale either.
We have:
- Soberton built in 1997/8 and a menace to take to an exhibition (I designed it so I can say it), given several new leases of life over the years; a big layout that doesn’t get out much because not many exhibitions can accommodate a layout of that size.
- Forleigh, original build date unknown, donated to the Club when Fawley Power Station MRC closed, big layout, not easy to transport and exhibit, doesn’t get out much for the same reasons as Soberton.
- Nictun Borrud “converted” around the same time as Soberton. Used to get out quite a lot but is now becoming “old hat” on the exhibition circuit.
- Gosport. This is a special project so I am going to skirt neatly past the subject.
- Fareport Wharf, new, a different concept of layout, approaching completion.
- Bramley Oak has gone, again a big layout which was only ever exhibited once.
- Ditto Mislingford which was only ever shown as a work-in-progress.
Children’s Corner is deliberately excluded from consideration here as although it does visit exhibitions it doesn’t really count as an exhibitable layout in the accepted sense.
So, we have three 00 Gauge layouts that in my view are life expired (Soberton, Forleigh and NB), all of which have done their time on the exhibition circuit, we have Fareport Wharf which is approaching its debut and we also have Fairhaven Town (0 Gauge and easily portable) which has scope to showcase the Club’s work, but currently not the active manpower able to exhibit it.
Also, thinking about invites to other exhibitions: aside from both Nictuns at Warley – supposedly next year but that has to be in doubt in the current climate – NB to Bristol and our pledge to help Victory MRC out of the situation they find themselves in with their exhibition, we don’t have any outstanding invites; plus Soberton and Forleigh have both reached their pinnacle, they have been to Warley and several of the other national shows, in fact the only big show we have yet to break into is York.
No, with our current portfolio of layouts we’ve been everywhere we are likely to go and done everything we are likely to be invited to do; if we want to maintain our “presence” in the hobby locally with other Clubs I think we need to start to refresh ourselves, I think the time has come – we need to review our layout portfolio, at least in the 00 arena.
We also have a major problem, the Elephant in the Room so-to-speak: SPACE. Nictun Borrud isn’t too bad in that it stacks into two pods plus a few extra bits, but both Soberton and Forleigh are monsters; Soberton’s support system was very much a product of its time: at Fareham Community Centre we only had the portacabin as our Clubroom in the car park. It was designed to go from flat pack into a workbench system and back to flat pack in the blink of an eye, a real boon in those days, but now it’s a nightmare to store. And Forleigh? I understand it was originally built as a static layout, in converting it into a portable one we have made a rod for our own back; end boards that are 8’ long and 2’6”+ wide, they are a minimum 4-man lift (but preferably 5 or 6) and present another nightmare. PLUS: I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but those end boards flex in the middle when lifted, this is because they weren’t originally designed (or constructed) to be that long. In converting the layout we bolted what was originally two boards at each end together to make one in order to get the uninterrupted scenery on the top BUT in doing this what we should have done was to introduce support members underneath that run the full length of the boards (or at least bridge the gap by a couple of feet either side of the join). Result: in my view there is a very real risk that one day we will lift them and one of them (probably the farm end) is going to suffer a major structural failure resulting in the board trying to fold in half.
Thanks to Derek we have attained our CIO status, thus assuring the long-term stability of the Club, but this has come with a certain amount of responsibility if we are to truly act out our charitable purpose. We are an educational charity and we have said that (among other things) we support the hobby locally by providing layouts and demonstrations to other club’s exhibitions, BUT we also need to look to what we do as a Club on meeting nights. In other words, we need to provide something for people to do on Club nights beyond drinking tea, eating biscuits and reflecting on past glories.
Sorry, tough decisions are needed.
But if we dump our older and bigger layouts what do we replace them with?
As a starter for 10, here are my thoughts on the sort of layouts that show managers like these days, the sort of layouts that are likely to get invited out, and coincidentally the sort of layouts that are easy to store when not in use: layouts like Fareport Wharf and Nictun Borrud (and Geoff’s Nictun 2000 – although that is technically not a Club layout). The basic formula seems to be about 16’ to 20’ long, (about 12’ of scenery) either a terminus to fiddle yard or through station with two fiddle yards – not roundy-roundy layouts because the depth of the ends means that they tend to stick out too far into the hall; number of operators is also an issue – the Nictuns can be worked by 2 or 3 operators, Forleigh needs at least 6, Soberton at least 8.
Now, if we were to dump those two big layouts (frees up valuable storage) in favour of building – say – six newer, smaller layouts that would get us back into the exhibition circuit, it would keep the Club’s profile where it should be in order to allow us to attract other clubs to participate in our exhibition, our main fundraiser of the year.
OK, I realise that not everyone is interested in going on the exhibition circuit but with a handful of new layouts those of us who enjoy that side of the hobby would be able to carry on promoting the Club. So, my thought process turns to what goes on in the Club; with a handful of smaller layouts we could have more of them up in the Clubroom at the same time, there would be more for people to do on a club night and if we were to do something similar to the arrangement that we have done in the past with Soberton and Nictun Borrud we could actually link layouts together as shown in the following picture. This would allow us to have more interesting operating sessions, remember, this story is supposed to be about recreating my experience of the CORy here in England.
Yes, this fits in the Clubroom! With a bit of creative manipulation (and discipline) there would be room to keep the recently shrunken Corhampton (N) and Fairhaven Town (0) up as well.
This arrangement would be made up of the six layouts shown in the next picture plus the extra components shown, that’s two single track triangular junctions and a couple of sceniced corner units. Fiddle yards for these layouts when used individually could be “traditional”, cassettes (my preference), sector plates or even turntables for the through stations; in fact, there’s no reason why fiddle yards couldn’t be shared between layouts chosen to the preference of the person who will be operating them.
AND: These don’t all have to be Club layouts! Geoff has already proved that a personal layout can very successfully be displayed under the Club banner with Nictun 2000. Ok, there is a potential problem: talking to another club with “Charitable Status”, during their “set up process” they were picked up by a community adviser because they were storing a number of member’s layouts in their clubrooms plus several members were abusing their use of Club facilities. It was resolved, there was a big argument about something called “deriving benefit” and they had to revise the way they were working. We would have to be careful, but I’m sure we could work out a way to get members to build layouts that could be included in this system. For example, I would happily build “Layout 1” from this system, I have a plan for a Swanage-esque terminus with a small goods yard which could easily be incorporated. Anyone else?
My design for the fiddle yard for the “joint” layout is set up with two banks of sidings, one bank for passenger stock and one for freight with plenty of scope for locomotive changes. The suggestion is that we limit trains to 3 or 4 coach rakes, or an equivalent length of goods train, and we have properly structured “operation sessions” where trains traverse all of the layouts during an operating session.
Note about this diagram: It is a Trax track building template (much reduced in size). The intention is that the ladders on each side would be either slips or more likely so-called Barry Slips like the one show below which would give loco (or wagon) stabling roads at each end of the fiddle yard. The problem with ordinary slip points is that they are expensive to both buy and make, Barry Slips are simply two interlaced points and although I haven't built one yet I reckon it should be possible to knock one out in a couple of evenings, they are simply "two points". Credit for this photo Mark Grady who sent it to me in an attempt to confuse me...
Once this enforced suspension of our group hobby is lifted and we are able to meet again the Club will have to have its postponed AGM – should be happening in May or June but who knows when it will actually take place – and there will be a lot to discuss by way of understanding the new structure we are working within.
We also need to decide where we are going in terms of Club activity. This is my “Starter for 10” and is very much intended to provoke discussion rather than to be a proscriptive way forward.
Over to you. Discuss…
Oh, and the intention is that we DO NOT have to do this all at once, I see it as something that is going to take a number of years to come fully to fruition.
POST SCRIPT 1: A number of you will know that I have designs on building a new home layout that depicts a terminus station set somewhere on the Gosport Peninsula, writing and reviewing this blog has helped me to crystallise in my mind how I could work the freight operations for it, so a big thank you to everyone who encouraged me to record my experiences in the US.
POST SCRIPT 2: Oh, and I lied. This isn’t going to be the last post in this blog after all. In finalising this episode I realised that there was another part of the story that would be worth telling – the control system and our efforts to convert it to DCC. As I haven’t started that yet it is unlikely that it will be published a week or so after this one, just give me time…
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